President Trump went to West Virginia on Tuesday to announce that he intends to replace President Obama’s Clean Power Plan with a version which, by respecting states’ rights, will also increase pollution, deaths and illnesses and climate risk, and thus, purportedly, bring back the coal industry. This aspect of the news was nearly overwhelmed by the guilty pleas of Michael Cohen and the conviction of Paul Manafort, but it’s significant. Like many Trump proposals, the new EPA draft combines a relentless rear-view mirror vision of America’s future with a tepid, at best, connection to reality.
The Obama rule, which set pollution reduction objectives from coal-fired power plants for 2030, never took effect. It would have allowed a lot of state flexibility, so while the Obama administration touted it as delivering a 32 percent reduction in carbon pollution from U.S. power plants, it might have required as little as 19 percent. The Trump administration says its substitute will cut carbon emissions no more than 1.5 percent. Using the 19 percent benchmark, it also concedes that this rollback will cause up to an additional 1,400 deaths.
So the rear-view mirror vision is there: Freeze modernization of the nation’s power sector, let pollution kill more Americans, require the use of unnecessarily expensive coal power, increase climate risk, dramatically slow overall progress.
Except. Except. That pesky problem of reality that so often plagues Trump crops up here in spades.
While it never took effect, the Clean Power Plan has already done the bulk of its work – because, unusually, states, cities and utilities all combined to undertake the reforms the plan envisaged. This not only happened ahead of schedule but before the rule even formally took effect.
So completely has the utility sector prepared for the objectives of the Clean Power Plan that 25 states will exceed their maximum potential emission reduction goals under the rule and 16 more are on track to meet those goals, mostly well ahead of 2030. Only nine states are still at risk of falling meaningfully short – West Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, North Dakota, Alabama, Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, and that number keeps shrinking.
Nationally, the numbers show dramatic over-performance – utilities are beating the CPP handily. The U.S. power sector by the end of 2017 had already cut 2005 emission levels by 28 percent and already announced coal plant closures and new renewable commitments were likely to add another 6 percent by 2020, taking the nation 2 percent above the CPP’s maximum 32 percent requirement a full decade early!
After more than 40 years of working on the Clean Air Act, I think this is a first. For the first time in all those years, the states and the regulated community (meaning the major utilities) came together and implemented the objective of a major EPA regulatory initiative – and this one was major – not only on schedule but well in advance, and in compliance with a regulation which was still in active litigation! Again, the response of the regulated community to the Clean Power Plan is absolutely unprecedented in the 48-year history of that statute.
Why did this happen?
The power sector is complicated, and its technology, economics and regulatory models are changing quickly, so lots of factors intervened. But four stand out.
- The coal fleet, the source of most utility carbon pollution, was old, inefficient and had never been modernized. These simply weren’t very good plants.
- Utilities looked at climate science and weather evidence and said to themselves, “The world is going low-carbon. We need to be part of that, and we can’t justify huge investments in band-aiding a technology that is going away very soon.” (Such expensive and ineffective band-aids are at the heart of the Trump EPA proposal.)
- Economics. Wind, solar and natural gas are already cheaper than coal in many states (including such laggards as Indiana and such surprising CPP compliers as Oklahoma). This drove coal retirements very rapidly in most states, leaving the remaining coal fleet, mostly in monopoly markets, with more than half its units losing money. Already announced retirements are not the end of the story – the coal fleet is going to keep shrinking unless the Trump administration reaches even deeper into its Harry Truman playbook and tries to nationalize power plants, as Truman did the steel mills. In Texas, where wind is particularly cheap and abundant, brand new coal plants are being written off by their owners as economic white elephants because the power they generate is twice as expensive as wind.
- Transitions like this, even ones simultaneously powered by social, regulatory and economic tailwinds, usually move slowly because stakeholders – politicians, regulators, corporate managers – aren’t facing persistent demands that they make decisions about the future today. The massive mobilization of citizens around coal plants – their pollution, their costs and their climate risks – backed for the first time in my lifetime with meaningful philanthropic resources -- meant that normal inertia was not allowed to set the pace. The Clean Power Plan’s looming requirements, then, for several critical years, provided an additional tool for reform advocates to push public service commissions, utilities, cities and corporate power customers to move rapidly toward a cheaper, cleaner and safer low-carbon future.
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This combination of factors has taken the utility sector, historically one of the most sluggish innovators in the U.S. economy, and driven it to become a stunning climate action leader. The courts need to take this into account in weighing whether, in deciding to cancel Obama's Clean Power Plan and replace it with an alternative which is some strange hybrid of a sham and an atrocity, the administration has even come close to meeting its obligations to take into account the actual and complete costs and benefits of its action. (Persnickety facts again.) And the media ought to start paying attention to how fast the American power sector is moving forward, as well as reporting how desperately the Trump administration is trying to make it go backward.
The litigation to defend the existing Clean Power Plan, and decisively shoot this sham version down, remains important. It goes to the heart of the integrity of the Clean Air Act. That’s because even though the residents of most states will enjoy the benefits teed up by the Clean Power Plan regardless of what the courts allow Trump to do, all citizens of the United States, including those living in the nine or so laggard states still clinging to dangerous, dirty and expensive coal facilities, are entitled to the protection guaranteed by the Clean Air Act way back in 1970 – and only now coming to far too many neighborhoods, perhaps including some near you.
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